As a small business owner, time is your most valuable resource. The only problem is, there never seems to be enough of it. The hours fly by, well-intentioned time-boundaries are forgotten, to-do lists are abandoned and before you know it, you’ve lost ten hours to answering emails and organising your calendar.
But what if you could reclaim those hours?
Research suggests that with the right admin support from a Virtual Assistant or freelance professional, you could gain back around 10 hours per week to spend on strategic business development, core functions, or evening out your work-life balance. Here’s how…
The Admin Time Drain
Admin is a bit of a time-vacuum. You get sucked into tasks like inbox management, calendar juggling, invoicing, content scheduling, and before you know it, ten minutes has turned into ten hours and a still incomplete to-do list. Admin activities are notoriously time-intensive and often prevent you from focusing on areas that drive revenue and growth. If you’re running your business solo or part of a very small team, this can stunt the growth of your business if not managed carefully.
In fact, according to a report by West Monroe, 36% of small business owners spend more than a quarter of their time on administrative tasks. This equates to over ten hours a week in many cases, time that could otherwise be focused strategic planning, client engagement, product development, or personal wellbeing. Being so caught up in admin and not having enough hours in the day can also increase stress, reduce productivity, and lead to missed opportunities. All of which we’d all like to avoid if possible!
So, how can you avoid the admin time drain with support from a Virtual Assistant?
The Role of a Virtual Assistant in Admin Efficiency
Virtual Assistants offer remote administrative support tailored to meet the needs of your business. Aka, if you need them to manage your inbox or send out your invoices, they’ll do exactly that. We’re trained to manage a wide range of tasks effectively, allowing you to offload routine responsibilities sure in the knowledge that they’re being handled effectively and professionally.
Finding and hiring the right Virtual Assistant means having someone who can handle your calendar management, send out your invoices, manage your inbox, schedule your social media posts, prep documents, update your CRM and more. By taking on these recurring, routine tasks, our aim is to help streamline operations, make sure nothing falls through the cracks and, most importantly, ensure you get some of your time back.
Working with a VA also helps support you with prioritisation – something that so many small business owners find challenging with so many responsibilities to juggle. Particularly when it comes to admin, it can be hard to know which admin tasks can be postponed and which can be delegated. As Virtual Assistants, we can help maintain tasks schedules, set reminders, and ensure everything is completed on time without you worrying about it. Not only does this keep things running smoothly, but it also reduces cognitive load, improves organisation, and reduces the stress associated with missed deadlines.
Finding and Reclaiming Your Hours
When admin processes are evaluated, optimised and support by Virtual Assistants, the time savings can be substantial. For example, if you ask your Virtual Assistant to manage your inbox, they may save you up to an hour a day by filtering messages and responding to routine enquiries. Another hour may be saved if they update your CRM or email out a batch of invoices. Another hour might be saved if they schedule your upcoming content or take on the responsibility of document formatting. Across a five-day workweek, these seemingly minor time savings can quickly accumulate to ten hours or more.
To add to that, Virtual Assistants are speedy when it comes to admin. Not only are they trained to complete tasks efficiently, but their attention is solely focused on the task at hand. This means they’re able to complete tasks quicker and with more accuracy than you may be able to while your attention is being pulled in a million different directions.
Deciding What to Delegate
Deciding what to delegate can be the trickiest part of investing in a Virtual Assistant. To ensure you’re reclaiming as many hours as possible, begin with a task audit. Make a list of all the admin tasks you’re responsible for over the course of the week, and time them when you’re doing them. If the task requires your direct attention to be completed effectively, then these may need to stay on your list. But any that don’t – i.e. tasks that are routine, non-core, or could be automated – and are time-intensive, these are the tasks you’ll want to consider for delegating.
Once you’ve selected your tasks to be outsourced, you can begin readjusting your daily schedule to accommodate the hours you’ve freed up. Over time, you and your Virtual Assistant will learn the new rhythms of your business together, and you may feel comfortable handing more tasks over in the long run.
Reclaim Your Hours with The Edwards Company
Here at The Edwards Company, we work with small business owners to help them reinvest their time back into their business. We take on the responsibility of some of their admin tasks to free up time for strategic development, service or product innovation, customer engagement or personal time. For more information on how we can help, please do not hesitate to get in touch.